Murray Bookchin

The Spanish Civil War, 1936

1986

Published: in New Politics no 1 (Summer 1986).HTML-markup:Jonas Holmgren

Between myth and reality there lies a precarious zone of
transition that occasionally captures the truth of each. Spain, caught in a
world-historic revolution fifty years ago, was exactly such an occasion—a rare
moment when the most generous, almost mythic dreams of freedom seemed suddenly
to become real for millions of Spanish workers, peasants, and intellectuals. For
this brief period of time, this shimmering moment, as it were, the world stood
breathlessly still, while the red banners of revolutionary socialism and the
red-and-black banners of revolutionary anarchosyndicalism floated over most of
Spain's major cities and thousands of her villages.

Taken together with the massive, spontaneous collectivization of
factories, fields, even hotels and restaurants, the oppressed classes of Spain
reclaimed history with a force and passion of an unprecedented scope and gave a
stunning reality in many areas of the peninsula to the ageless dream of a free
society. The Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 was, at its inception, the last of the
classical European workers' and peasants' revolutions—not, let me make it clear,
a short-lived "uprising," a cadre-controlled "guerrilla war," or a simple civil
conflict between regions for national supremacy. And like so many life-forms
that appear for the last time, before fading away forever, it was the most
far-reaching and challenging of all such popular movements of the great
revolutionary era that encompasses Cromwellian England of the late 1640s and the
working-class uprisings of Vienna and Asturias of the early 1930s.

It is not a myth but a sheer lie—the cretinous perversion of
history by its makers in the academy—to depict the Spanish Civil War as a mere
prelude to World War II, an alleged conflict between "democracy and fascism."
Not even World War II deserves the honor of this ideological characterization.
Spain was seized by more than a civil war: it was in the throes of a profound
social revolution. Nor was this revolution, like so many self-styled ones of
recent years, simply the product of Spain's struggle for modernization. If
anything, Spain was one of those very rare countries where problems of
modernization helped inspire a real social revolution rather than a
reaction or adaptation to Western and Eastern Europe's economic and social
development. This seemingly "Third World" feature of the Spanish Civil War and,
above all, the extraordinary alternatives it posed to capitalism and
authoritarian forms of socialism make the revolution hauntingly relevant to
liberation movements today. In modernizing the country, the Spanish working
class and peasantry literally took over much of its economy and managed it
directly in the form of collectives, cooperatives, and union-networked
syndicalist structures. Democratically-run militias, free of all ranking
distinctions and organized around a joint decision-making process that involved
the soldiers as well as their elected "commanders," moved rapidly to the
military fronts.

To have stopped Franco's "Army of Africa," composed of foreign
legionnaires and Moorish mercenaries—perhaps the blood-thirstiest and certainly
one of the most professionalized troops at the disposal of any European nation
at the time—and its well-trained Civil Guards and police auxiliaries, would have
been nothing less than miraculous once it established a strong base on the
Spanish mainland. That hastily formed, untrained, and virtually unequipped
militiamen and women slowed up Franco's army's advance on Madrid for four months
and essentially stopped it on the outskirts of the capital is a feat for which
they have rarely earned the proper tribute from writers on the civil war of the
past half century.

Behind the "Republican" lines, power lay essentially in the hands
of the trade unions and their political organizations: the million-member
General Confederation of Workers (UGT), the labor federation of the Socialist
Workers Party (PSOE), and the equally large General Confederation of Labor
(CNT), strongly influenced by the semi-clandestine Iberian Anarchist Federation
(FAI). Additionally, another leftist organization, the Workers Party of Marxist
Unification (POUM), whose more radical members and leaders had been rooted in a
Trotskyist tradition in earlier years, followed up the more influential
socialists and anarchists. In Catalonia, the POUM outnumbered by far the
Communist and Socialist Parties which united to form the predominantly
Communist-controlled Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC). The Communist
Party (PCE) at the inception of the revolution was inconsequential in numbers
and influence, lagging far behind the three major left-wing organizations and
their unions.

The wave of collectivizations that swept over Spain in the summer
and autumn of 1936 has been described in a recent BBC-Granada documentary as
"the greatest experiment in workers' self-management Western Europe has ever
seen," a revolution more far-reaching than any which occurred in Russia during
1917-21 and the years before and after it.[1]
In anarchist industrial areas like Catalonia, an estimated three-quarters of the
economy was placed under workers' control, as it was in anarchist rural areas
like Aragon. The figure tapers downward where the UGT shared power with the CNT
or else predominated: 50 percent in anarchist and socialist Valencia, and 30
percent in socialist and liberal Madrid. In the more thoroughly anarchist areas,
particularly among the agrarian collectives, money was eliminated and the
material means of life were allocated strictly according to need rather than
work, following the traditional precepts of a libertarian communist society. As
the BBC-Granada television documentary puts it: "The ancient dream of a
collective society without profit or property was made reality in the villages
of Aragon. ... All forms of production were owned by the community, run by
their workers."

The administrative apparatus of "Republican" Spain belonged
almost entirely to the unions and their political organizations. Police in many
cities were replaced by armed workers' patrols. Militia units were formed
everywhere—in factories, on farms, and in socialist and anarchist community
centers and union halls, initially including women as well as men. A vast
network of local revolutionary committees coordinated the feeding of the cities,
the operations of the economy, and the meting out of justice, indeed, almost
every facet of Spanish life from production to culture, bringing the whole of
Spanish society in the "Republican" zone into a well-organized and coherent
whole. This historically unprecedented appropriation of society by its most
oppressed sectors—including women, who were liberated from all the constraints
of a highly traditional Catholic country, be it the prohibition of abortion and
divorce or a degraded status in the economy—was the work of the Spanish
proletariat and peasantry. It was a movement from below that overwhelmed even
the revolutionary organizations of the oppressed, including the CNT-FAI.
"Significantly, no left organization issued calls for revolutionary takeovers of
factories, workplaces or the land," observes Ronald Fraser in one of the most
up-to-date accounts of the popular movement. "Indeed, the CNT leadership in
Barcelona, epicenter of urban anarchosyndicalism, went further: rejecting the
offer of power presented to it by President Companys [the head of the Catalan
government], it decided that the libertarian revolution must stand aside for
collaboration with the Popular Front forces to defeat the common enemy. The
revolution that transformed Barcelona in a matter of days into a city virtually
run by the working class sprang initially from individual CNT unions, impelled
by their most advanced militants; and as their example spread it was not only
large enterprises but small workshops and businesses that were being taken over.[2]

I quote Fraser to emphasize the remarkable power of education and
discussion, and the critical examination of experience in the development of
many segments of the Spanish working class and peasantry. For Communists like
Eric Hobsbawn to designate these segments, largely influenced by anarchist
ideas, as "primitive rebels" is worse than prejudice; it represents ideology
mechanically imposed on the flux of history, organizing it into "stages" of
development in flat contradiction to real life and freezing it into categories
that exist solely in the mind of the historian. Since Spain, as we are told, was
a predominately agrarian country, in fact, "feudal" in its social structure, its
proletariat must have been "undeveloped" and its peasantry caught in a fever of
"millennarian" expectations. These "primitive" features of Spain's development
somehow account, so the story goes, for the more than one million members of the
anarchosyndicalist CNT out of a population of twenty-four million. Spain's
bourgeoisie, it is further argued, was the cowed stepchild of the country's
territorial grandees, its clerics, and its bloated officer corps; Spain needed a
"bourgeois-democratic" revolution, akin to the French and American, as a
"historical precondition" for a "socialist" one. This "stages theory," with its
salad of "preconditions," was invoked with considerable effectiveness by the
Communist International in the 1930s against the reality of an authentic
workers' and peasants' revolution. Where it could not be completely concealed
from the outside world, the revolution was denounced by the Communists as
"premature" in a "balance of history" that was determined somewhere in the
foreign commissariat of Stalinist Russia and resolutely assaulted by the PCE on
a scale that brought "Republican" Spain to the edge of a civil war within the
civil war.

Recent accounts of Spain and the revolution of 1936 give us a
very different picture of the country's society from its portrayal by the
Communists, their liberal allies, and even by such well-intentioned observers as
Gerald Brenan and Franz Borkenau. Despite its outward trappings, Spain was not
the overwhelmingly agrarian and "feudal" country we were taught it was two
generations ago. From the turn of the century to the coming of the Second
Republic in 1931, Spain had undergone enormous economic growth with major
changes in the relative weight of the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors.
From 1910 to 1930 the peasantry had declined from 66 percent to 45.5 percent of
the working population, while industrial workers had soared from 15.8 percent to
26.5 percent and those in services from 18.1 percent to 27.9 percent. Indeed,
the peasantry now formed a minority of the population, not its traditional
majority, and a substantial portion of the "peasantry" owned land, particularly
in areas that adhered to the highly conservative "National Front" as against the
liberal-socialist-communist coalition under the rubric of the "Popular Front."
Indeed, omitting the Center parties the "Popular Front"—whose election in
February 1936 precipitated the military plots that led to the Francoist
rebellion six months later—received only 54 percent of the vote in a voting
procedure and under circumstances that favored them. Moreover, as Edward
Malefakis has shown in his thoroughly researched study of agrarian unrest in the
period leading up to the civil war, the CNT had its greatest strength among the
industrial working class of Catalonia, not among the "millennarian" agricultural
day-workers of the South. Many of these braceros joined socialist unions
in the 1930s, pushing the reformist Socialist party in an increasingly
revolutionary direction.[3]

Spain's rapid rate of industrialization and the shift of the
country from "feudal" to essentially capitalist forms of agriculture occurred
well in advance of the "Popular Front" victory. The decade of the 1920s under
the fairly indulgent, Mussolini-type dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (a Spanish
parody of Italian fascism in which leading Socialists like Largo Caballero
actually held official positions as did other UGT chieftains), saw an economic
modernization of the country that almost equaled and in some cases exceeded the
boom years under Franco between 1960 and 1973. Illiteracy was substantially
decreased, and economic expansion was accelerated; hence the very sizable middle
class or service workers with middle-class values that could be played against
the militant working class of Spain.

The greatest single reservoir of economic unrest was in the
south: Andalusia's plantation or latifundia society, structured around
the cultivation of olives, cereals, grapes—and the large workforce of
desperately poor, half-starved landless day-laborers. Caught in the trammels of
Spain's quasifeudal grandees, hundreds of thousands of braceros lived in
bitter desperation, a way of life that contrasted with the opulence and cold
arrogance of the royalist upper class of nobles and bourgeois who were to form
the cutting edge of Franco's rebellion and were the principal beneficiaries of
his victory.

Periodic uprisings of the braceros had culminated in an
agrarian war in 1918-20 and were put down mercilessly, leaving a legacy of
savage class hatred that expressed itself in the burning of crops, farm
buildings, and rural mansions (many of which were turned into virtual fortresses
during times of social unrest), and assassinations on both sides of the class
barrier. Long before the 1930s, Andalusia became, for all practical purposes, an
occupied territory where Civil Guards patrolled the countryside and, together
with armed thugs hired by landowners, fired wantonly at striking braceros
and created the endemic violence that claimed an appalling toll during the first
weeks of the civil war. Yet here too, agriculture was largely capitalistic in
its orientation toward the marketplace. Andalusia's produce was cultivated
largely for international trade. Noble titles often concealed bourgeois avarice
in its most unfeeling form, and upper-class references to the "tradition" of
Spain barely camouflaged pernicious greed and privilege.

What cannot be ignored after presenting this tableau is the
extent to which the crisis that led to the 1936 revolution was cultural as well
as economic. Spain was a land of several nations: Basques and Catalans who
sought autonomy for their respective cultures and viewed Spanish lifeways with a
measure of disdain; Castilians who appeared as the collective oppressors of the
peninsula, despite their own internal divisions; an arrogant nobility that fed
on images of Spain's "golden era" and lived in almost parochial isolation from
the real Spain that surrounded them; an incestuous officer caste that belonged
to one of the country's lingering "orders" and for whom "national regeneration"
had devolved from the values of liberalism and "modernity" to those of sheer
reaction; finally, a virtually medieval Church that was excessively propertied,
rigidly hierarchical, and often bitterly hated because of the contrast between
its pious rhetoric of human "brotherhood" and its patent partisanship with the
upper classes.

Above all, Spain was a land in which cultures were in dramatic
transition between town and country, feudalism and capitalism—a nostalgic world
that looked back to a past of aristocratic supremacy and forward to a future of
plebeian egalitarianism that found its most radical form in a huge
anarchosyndicalist movement. What made the Spanish working class so uniquely
revolutionary, in my view, was its well-rooted ancestry in the countryside—in a
relatively slow-paced, organic agrarian world that clashed sharply with the
highly rationalized, mechanized industrial world of the cities. In the
force-field of these two cultures, Spanish workers in the Mediterranean coastal
cities retained an obduracy, a sense of moral tension, a feeling for
preindustrial lifeways, and a commitment to community that cannot be conveyed to
a generation immured in the received wisdom and prepackaged lifeways of a highly
commodified, market-oriented era.

The intensity of this force-field was heightened by a Spanish
heritage of strong sociability: urban barrios were actually intimate
villages within the city, knitted together by cafes, community centers and union
halls and energized by a vital outdoor public life that stood at sharp variance
with the aristocratic mythos of the Spanish past and the hated Church which had
abdicated all claims to public service. The elite classes of the country, so
completely divorced from those who worked for them, were highly protective of
the privileges conferred upon them by pedigree, status, and landed wealth, which
often produced fissures as bourgeois parvenus began to enter a social terrain
guarded for centuries by tradition and history.

Accordingly, one always "belonged" in a deeply social,
cultural, regional, class, and economic sense—whether it was to a part of Spain,
to a hierarchy, a caste, a clan, an institution (be it the army or a union), and
finally, to a neighborhood, village, town, city, and province, precisely in that
order of loyalty. In this cultural sense affiliations and antagonisms often
overrode economic considerations to an extent that is now barely comprehensible
To cite only one example, the workers of Saragossa, even more anarchist in their
ideology than their syndicalistic comrades in Barcelona, disdained strikes for
"paltry" economic demands; they normally put down their tools in behalf of their
brothers and sisters in prisons or over issues of politics, human rights, and
class solidarity. In one truly incredible instance, these "pure" anarchists
declared a twenty-four-hour general-strike because the German Communist leader,
Ernst Thälmann, had been arrested by Hitler.

Behind this vibrantly radical culture was a rich tradition of
direct action, self-management, and confederal association. Spain had barely
become a nation-state under Ferdinand and Isabella—the "Catholic monarchs" who
conquered the last Moorish strongholds on the peninsula—when the monarchy was
faced with a historic crisis. Under the Comuneros (translated literally,
the Communards), Castile's major cities rose up in revolt to demand what was
virtually a form of nationhood structured primarily around a confederation of
municipalities. In this remarkable moment when a confederal political system
hovered as an alternative to a centralized nation-state, Castilian cities
created short-lived ward democracies and neighborhood assemblies and
enfranchised people in the lowest ranks of the community on a scale that would
have sent a shudder of fear through Europe's ruling elites, possibly comparable
to the impact of the Paris Commune of 1871.[4]
Such confederal movements percolated through Spanish history for generations .
They took real-life form in the extraordinary power of local society over
centralized state institutions, exploding in movements like the Federalists of
Pi y Margall of the early 1870s and the anarchists schooled in the writings of
Bakunin. But Spanish localism and confederalism were not strictly an anarchist
phenomenon: they were Spanish to the core and infused the most traditional
socialists, even the Basque nationalists, who advanced municipalist notions of
political control against the centralized state's authority well into the 1930s.

Spanish radicalism, in effect, raised questions and provided
answers that have a unique relevance to the problems of our day: local autonomy,
confederalism, collectivism, self-management, and base democracy in opposition
to state centralism, nationalization, managerial control, and bureaucracy. The
world did not know this in 1936, nor does it understood the scope of these
issues adequately today. Indeed, Spanish radicalism also raised ideological
images that history rendered obsolete in Europe: images of a classical
proletarian insurrection, barricades, a syndicalist triumph of revolutionary
trade unions, and inchoate notions of emancipation cloaked in a Bolshevik mantle
claimed by Stalin rather than in Spain's own popular traditions. It was this
swirling vortex of social dislocations that the Spanish army tried to still, a
vortex of institutional relics, an agrarian crisis where large-scale
agribusiness dressed in aristocratic vestments was pitted against a ragged,
land-hungry, labor force of day-workers, and an arrogant nobility, an avaricious
bourgeoisie, an inordinately materialistic Church, and a servile middle class
against the most volatile proletariat and peasantry Europe had seen in a century
of revolutionary anarchism and socialism.

The events leading to the outbreak of civil war can be dealt with
summarily. In Spain, history seems to repeat itself first as farce and only
later as tragedy. The social dislocations that followed World War I seem almost
a comic anticipation of the developments that preceded Franco's uprising. A wave
of revolutionary unrest gave way in 1923 to the military dictatorship of General
Primo de Rivera, a pleasure-loving, rather dissolute Andalusian aristocrat who
easily came to terms with the UGT and the Socialists at the expense of their
anarchosyndicalist rivals and who essentially ignored the Spanish Communist
Party because of its sheer insignificance. The boom years of the 1920s were
followed by a rapid decline in Primo's authoritarian government, which pulled
the props out from underneath the monarchy itself. In April 1931 Spain returned
after some two generations to a republican political system, seemingly with
almost universal enthusiasm—but the system's authority waned quickly when a
liberal-Socialist coalition tried to address the crucial agrarian problems that
had beleaguered all Spanish governments for generations. Hammered on the right
by the attempted military coup of General Sanjurjo (August 1932) and by
anarchosyndicalist insurrectionism on the left which culminated in the Casas
Viejas massacre of Andalusian peasants (January 1933), the coalition lay in the
debris of its own ill-starred reforms.

In the summer of 1933, Spain's multitude of parties and
organizations began to regroup and polarize. In November of that year, a
coalition of the right, the Spanish Confederation of Right Groups (CEDA)
replaced the liberal-Socialist coalition headed by Manuel Azaña. The forces that
consigned the first "Republican" government in some sixty years to the historic
garbage heap now formed the impetus for a radical shift to the two extremes.
Disenchanted with liberal ineptitude and subjected to increasing internal
pressure by the influx of Andalusian braceros, the Socialist Party veered
sharply from reformism to revolutionism in little more than a year. Just as the
CEDA found the newly formed fascistic Falange on its far right, so Largo
Cabellero (now styled the "Lenin of Spain") found the recent POUM, a melding of
two independent revolutionary Marxist groups, on his far left and the
anarchosyndicalists in a state of chronic revolution still further off on their
own.

The barricades that the Viennese Socialist workers raised early
in 1934 in the face of a reactionary assault on their very existence had their
bloody Spanish counterpart eight months later in the "October Revolution" of
1934, when Asturian miners, raising red and red-and-black flags over the
mountain towns and cities of northern Spain, became the epicenter of a general
uprising throughout the country. It was then that the increasingly well-known
commander of the "Army of Africa," one Francisco Franco, brought Moorish troops
as well as foreign legionnaires onto Spanish soil for the first time in five
hundred years to defend "Christian Civilization" from "red barbarism." In a
taste of the fierce counterrevolutionary retribution that was yet to come, two
thousand miners were executed in the aftermath of the Asturias uprising and tens
of thousands of Socialists, anarchosyndicalists, in smaller numbers Communists,
and even some liberals found themselves in Spanish jails while the rest of the
country smoldered in a savage class and regional hatred that found its full
satisfaction two years later.

Under an ostensibly shared eagerness to free the October
prisoners and in fear of growing rightist provocation of the kind that had
finally brought the Viennese Socialists into insurrection, a "Popular Front" was
slapped together from such widely disparate political groups as the Republican
left, the Socialists, the Esquerra (Luis Companys's Catalan nationalists), the
Communist Party, the Syndicalist Party (a political arm of the dissident
anarchosyndicalist, Angel Pestaña), and the POUM (in Catalonia). The term
"Popular Front" apparently originated in the French Communist Party and the
Soviet-French Treaty of Mutual Assistance (May 1935) in which both countries
vowed to aid each other if either was "threatened or in danger of aggression."
With the Popular Front, all Western Communist Parties and all their front
organizations made a sharp volte face from a previous totally insane
policy of revolutionary adventurism, in which even the CNT was dubbed
"reformist," to a queasy "line" of total accommodation to the "forces of
democracy" and an abject surrender of all radical principles to reformism. That
the new gospel of leftists joining with liberals was nothing less than Stalin's
wholesale prostitution of the world's Communist Parties for "non-aggression" and
preferably "mutual assistance" pacts between Russia and any power that was
prepared to enter the Stalinist brothel became clear by 1936.

It is difficult today, when radical theory has retreated to the
couloirs of the academy and radical practice to the smoke-filled rooms of
liberal politicians, to recognize the crisis of conscience that "Popular
Frontism" created in the Communist movement. Contrary to recent myths that the
"Popular Front" was a welcome change of line, a waning generation from the era
can still recall how American left-wing socialists taunted Communist Party
members for the rapid desertion of their revolutionary ideals. In Spain, this
took the form of the particularly cutting remark: "Vote Communist and Save
Capitalism." The numbers who left "the Party" in bitterness were probably
immense throughout the world. Yet neither "anti-fascism" nor a passion for
"bourgeois democracy" can explain what kept thousands of revolutionary
Communists in the Stalinist movement. That Communist parties were able to
acquire more members in unprecedented numbers, many of whom were very tentative
in their commitments, attests to the fact that even in the "red thirties,"
Western Europe and America contained more liberals than radicals. It also
attests to the uncritical, often mindless loyalty of Communists to the Soviet
Union as the "first Socialist country" in the world and to the legacy of the
October Revolution—even as its leaders were being slaughtered en masse by
Stalin's NKVD.

Equally fundamentally the "Popular Front" introduced a doctrinal
crisis into the corpus of revolutionary Marxism. The very raison d'être
for a Communist Party anywhere in the world had been Social Democracy's
legacy of "betrayals," creating the need for a new revolutionary movement.
"Betrayal," in the language of the day, meant the abandonment of Marx's basic,
indeed unswerving strategy of revolutionary independence for all authentic
"workers' parties." This precept, forcefully voiced by Marx and Engels in their
famous "Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League" (March 1850),
warned that "everywhere workers' candidates are put up alongside of the
bourgeois-democratic candidates ... to preserve their independence." As if in
anticipation of "popular frontism" a century later both men forbade Communists
from allowing "themselves to be seduced by such arguments of the democrats as,
for example, that by so doing they are splitting the democratic party and making
it possible for the reactionaries to win."[5]

To abandon these precepts was to assail the authenticity of
Communism as such, indeed, to discard the most fundamental principles of
Bolshevism as a truly Marxist politics. It had been on the strength of these
strategic ideas that the Bolshevik Party had come to power in 1917 and defined
itself as a revolutionary movement. For Stalin in the Popular Front to adopt
exactly what Marx Engels, and Lenin had regarded as the most "treacherous"
features of "bourgeois democracy" and Social Democracy reduced world Communist
movements to mere guardians of the Soviet Union and an extension of Stalinist
foreign policy. If anything could justify so abject a role for Communists, it
was their belief—held consciously or not—that Russia was the main force for the
achievement of world socialism. This doctrinal mystification essentially
replaced the power of the oppressed to change society and thereby
change themselves in a supreme act of self-empowerment, with the power of a
"workers' state" to instrumentally redesign society.

The logic of this mentality had disastrous ramifications, ones
that exist today even as they did fifty years ago. This Popular Front
mystification was to turn socialism from a social movement into a largely
diplomatic one. World Communist Parties which had been spawned in a period of
authentic revolution were to be denatured by the mythos of a socialism achieved
by international power politics into mere tools for preserving or abetting the
interests of a nation-state. The Popular Front, in effect, not only planted
socialism in a geographical area and divested it of its ethical calling to
redeem humanity; it rendered the "ideal," with all its visionary and critical
meanings over the course of history, territorial and invested it with the fixity
of the "real," notably as a mere instrument of national policy.*

The argument between the compromised Communist movement of the
Popular Front and its leftist critics unfolded on a multitude of levels over the
three tortured years that preceded the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939. Left
Socialists generally called it "class collaboration," with blunt clarity; the
forfeiture of the very sense of revolutionary purpose that alone could defeat
fascism, much less achieve socialism; the proclivity of liberals to deliver
democratic liberties to fascists rather than yield power to an insurgent working
class. Remote as the Popular Front era seems today, it is striking that leftist
challenges to it have been supported by reality to an uncanny extent.

In Spain, the victory of the Popular Front in February 1936
virtually unleashed a revolution by itself. The organizations that orchestrated
its electoral success allowed a government of liberal mice, marked by timidity
and a fear of the working class and peasantry, to preside over their destiny.
The incongruity between the bumbling Azaña regime in Madrid and the wave of
strikes, rural land seizures, and gun-battles that swept over Spain between
February and July, when Franco finally "pronounced" against the "Republic," is
so stark and the logic of events that left only two choices by the summer of
1936—either libertarian revolution or bloody authoritarian reaction—is so
compelling that Franco's easy success in transporting the "Army of Africa" from
Spanish Morocco to the mainland was an act of governmental betrayal in its own
right.

The CNT placed all its militants on alert and blanketed Barcelona
with workers patrols, but the other leftist parties which had formed the
"Popular Front" were essentially quiescent. Even after Franco rose and the
government attempted to strike a deal with the military, causing people to fill
the streets demanding arms, the Communist and Socialist Parties jointly
declared: "It is a difficult, not a desperate time. The government is sure it
has adequate means to crush this criminal move. Should its means prove
inadequate, the Republic has the Popular Front's solemn promise. It is ready to
intervene in the struggle if it is asked to help. The government commands and
the Popular Front obeys."[6]

It is not the case that no one knew early on that the army
garrisons would rise—or, for that matter, when and where. Owing to its excellent
intelligence service, which had penetrated the military, police, and security
forces generally, the CNT had warned months in advance that the army was
planning a coup in the summer of 1936 and that its base would be Spanish
Morocco. Even more compelling, Colonel Escofet, the Republican police chief of
Barcelona, had learned from informers and wiretaps that the rising would occur
on July 19 at 5 A.M., exactly as the conspirators had originally planned, and he
gave this information to the Catalan and Madrid governments. They met his
information with disbelief—not because they regarded a coup as incredible but
because they could not act upon the information without arming the people. That
alternative was simply excluded. Indeed, as Escofet later frankly admitted, he
blandly lied to CNT leaders who came to him demanding arms by "saying they could
go home since the rising had been postponed."[7]

The very opposite, in fact, had happened: the rising was pushed
forward by two days. As early as the morning of July 17, when Franco's aides
broadcast news of the army rebellion, the naval station near Madrid intercepted
the report and brought it to the Ministry of the Navy. The only decisive action
the government took was to conceal it from the people—indeed, like Escofet, to
lie by announcing the utterly false story that the uprising in Seville had been
crushed. The lie was all the more horrendous because thousands of workers in the
city were being systematically executed by the military after army rebels had
vanquished them. It was only from popular initiative—first in Barcelona, where
the army was defeated after two days of fighting by the combined action of the
workers and sympathetic Civil Guards, and later in Madrid, Valencia, Málaga, and
virtually all the major cities in central Spain—that coordinated resistance
emerged from the political centers of the country.

There were no sensational victories by the army and no decisive
failures by the people. Apart from the Andalusian cities which Franco and his
generals quickly captured, as often by ruse as by arms, the pronunciamiento
was essentially a military failure, and the conflict dragged on to its bloody
conclusion for the greater part of three years. That Franco was able to
establish himself on the mainland was due to the hesitation of the "Popular
Front" regime which misled the people; partly because the leftist parties,
fearful of challenging the government's authority, seemed to be sleepwalking
through the opening days of the rebellion, and partly because this very
government was negotiating with the military rather than arming the people. As a
result, radical urban centers like Seville, Granada, and to the surprise of the
army itself, Oviedo in Asturias and Saragossa in Aragon, fell to local military
commanders by sheer ruse because the workers had been kept in ignorance of what
was happening elsewhere in Spain. The slaughter that occurred in all these
cities when the army took over initiated a terrible hemorrhaging of the Spanish
working class and peasantry, a bloodletting that turned Spain into a cemetery
for more than thirty-five years. As Pierre Broué and Emile Témime conclude in
their excellent account of the revolution and civil war, "In effect, each time
that the workers' organizations allowed themselves to be paralyzed by their
anxiety to respect Republican legality and each time their leaders were
satisfied with what was said by the officers, the latter prevailed. On the other
hand, the Movimiento of the generals was repulsed where the workers had
time to arm and whenever they set about the destruction of the Army as such,
independently of their leaders' position or the attitude of 'legitimate' public
authorities."[8]

There is nothing in this account that a revolutionary socialist
or anarchist could not have predicted from the day the "Popular Front" came to
power. The liberals played out their classical role with almost textbook
exactness. The Socialist Party, divided between a cynical right and an
irresolute left, was eaten away by indecision and a failure of nerve that
brought its own conservative chieftains to the point of treachery. Finally, the
anarchosyndicalist leaders, far less decisive than their rank-and-file
militants, refused to take power in their Catalan stronghold as a matter of
principle in the opening weeks of the revolution—only to compromise their most
basic antistatist doctrines later by humbly entering the central government as
ministerial fixtures. Harried by Communist and liberal assaults on the militia
system and the collectivization, and by an increasingly deadly Stalinist terror,
the CNT-FAI leadership withdrew into a posture of plaintive clients of the
"Popular Front," whining rather than fighting against the rollback of the
revolution that had been the result of a popular movement more than of their own
efforts.

But what no one seems to have expected was the resoluteness with
which the Spanish Communist Party played out its counterrevolutionary role,
abetted by Soviet weapons, "Comintern" agents, NKVD experts, and in no small
part, individual members of the "International Brigades," who provided the PCE
with some of its best assassins. The initial response of the Communists to
Franco's pronunciamiento was designed to bolster the reputation of the
liberal government which was trying to come to terms with the insurgent
generals. More than any organization that professed to be "leftist," the PCE
opened its doors to the most conservative elements that found themselves behind
the "Republican" lines, becoming the rallying point for domestic reaction, and
steadily ate away at the revolution in the name of "antifascism." Not only did
it try to arrest collectivization, it tried to reverse it , restoring hierarchy
in the institutions that formed the infrastructure of Spanish life and speaking
openly for the bourgeois interest in Spanish society. The files of Mundo
Obrero, the PCE's principal organ, are filled with journalistic
declamations, manifestos, and editorials that denounce the militias in favor of
a fully officered "Popular Army," lend support to the liberals and right-wing
Socialists against criticism by the Socialist left and the anarchists, and
denounce any exercise of power by the unions and revolutionary committees with
the cry, "The slogan today is all power and authority to the People's Front
government" (Daily Worker, September 11, 1936).

To explain why any self-professed radicals remained in the PCE is
almost impossible without analyzing the organization's sense of priorities: the
wishful identification of "socialism" on the part of its more committed members
with a nation-state, even at the expense of a popular movement that was actively
emancipatory elsewhere. In this very real sense, the Spanish Communist Party was
no more Spanish than its Soviet counterpart and as a result of its
identification of "communism" with Stalin's national policies, no more communist
than the Catholic Basque movements that opposed Franco.

The "leftist" government formed by Largo Cabellero in September
1936 was aimed at mobilizing Socialist, anarchosyndicalist, and Communist
leaders not only against the army but against the revolution initiated by their
own rank-and-file. As Largo Caballero attested after he had been removed from
office, Soviet intervention in Spanish affairs was brutally overt and demanding.
The revolution was blemishing the Soviet Union's image as a respectable
nation-state in the pursuit of diplomatic alliances. It had to be stopped.
Caballero was anything but a revolutionary, but he had a real base in the
Spanish Socialist Party which gave him enough freedom to act according to his
own judgment, a fatal flaw in the eyes of the Communists.

Nevertheless it was under this regime that the revolution
expired. On September 30, the "Popular Army" was proclaimed, to the delight of
the liberals, Communists, and right-wing Socialists; indeed, nearly all parties
and organizations on the left abetted the transformation of the militias into a
conventional army. The distribution of weapons, equipment, and resources among
different sectors of the front and to different regions of the country was
scandalously governed by political considerations. They were even abandoned to
Franco if the Communists and their allies suspected they would become available
to the anarchosyndicalists. To cite one of many examples, Spain's only prewar
cartridge factory in the "Republican" zone, at Toledo, was permitted to fall
into the hands of Francoist forces rather than remove it to Barcelona which
would have strengthened the revolutionary movement—this, despite pleas by José
Tarradellas, the deputy of the Catalan premier Luis Companys, who personally
visited Madrid to present his request for its removal.
[9]

Reinforced by Soviet arms and the huge membership that it
acquired largely from the middle classes, the PCE launched an outright assault
on the collectives and the revolutionary committees, even purging the
anarchosyndicalists, which Pravda, the organ of the Soviet Communist
Party, declared "will be conducted with the same energy with which it was
conducted in the U.S.S.R" (December 17, 1936). "Chekist organizations recently
discovered in Madrid," warned the anarchosyndicalist newspaper Solidaridad
Obrera on April 25, 1937, referring to NKVD-type secret prisons and police
forces "... are directly linked with similar centers under a unified
leadership and a preconceived plan of national scope." We do not have to go to
George Orwell, a victim of these "Chekists" (the term applied to the Bolshevik
secret police during the Russian Revolution), for personal verification of the
charge. Pravda had already projected the formation of this network, and
after the war, numerous anarchosyndicalists and POUMists gave detailed accounts
of their own experiences at the hands of this Communist-controlled system of
internal repression.

The decisive point in destroying the popular movement and
reducing its militants to passivity came in early May 1937, when Catalan
security forces under the personal command of the Communist commissioner of
public safety, Salas, tried to seize the CNT-controlled telephone building in
Barcelona. The attack triggered off a virtual insurrection by the Catalan
working class, which had been nursing months of grievances against the
Communists and liberals. Within hours, barricades were raised all over the city,
and the "Lenin Barracks," the Communist military stronghold, was completely
surrounded by armed workers. The insurrection spread beyond Barcelona to Lérida,
where the Civil Guards surrendered their arms to the workers, to Tarragona,
Gerona, and to militiamen on the Aragon front, who prepared to send detachments
to the CNT urban centers. The dramatic five days between May 3 and 8, when CNT
workers could have reclaimed their dwindling revolutionary conquests, were days
not of defeat but of treachery—no less by the clique that led the CNT than the
Communists, who were prepared to create a civil war within the civil war,
irrespective of its toll on the struggle against the Francoists. Lacking even a
modicum of this resoluteness, the "anarchist ministers," Montseny and García
Oliver induced the CNT workers to lay down their arms and return to their homes.
This self-inflicted defeat turned into an outright rout when superbly armed
"Republican" assault guards entered Barcelona in force to contain its restive
population. Barcelona had been turned from the center of the revolution into the
cowed occupied zone of outright counterrevolution—at a cost in life, it may be
noted, comparable to the losses the city had suffered in the army's uprising a
year earlier.

The failure of the insurrection—the famous "May Days"—opened wide
the gates of the Communist-led counterrevolution. Largo Caballero was forced to
resign, replaced by Juan Negrín, who leaned heavily on PCE support up to the
very end of the war. Two months later, the POUM was officially outlawed, and
Andres Nín, its most gifted leader, murdered by Soviet agents in collusion with
Thälmann Battalion members of the International Brigades. The
anarchosyndicalists, too, suffered heavily, especially with the assassination of
Carlo Bernieri, the authentic voice of Italian anarchism and a sharp critic of
the CNT leadership. There is also compelling evidence that members of the
Garibaldi Battalion of the International Brigades were implicated in his murder
during the May Days. By August, the notorious Military Investigation Service
(SIM) was formed under Negrín's premiership to intensify the Stalinist terror
inflicted on militant anarchosyndicalists and POUM-ists. In the same month, the
Moscow-trained thug Enrique Líster, led his Communist 11th Division into the
last rural strongholds of anarchism, where he disbanded the Council of Aragon
and an indeterminable number of collectives and cowed the revolutionary
movement, under orders, by his own admission, to "shoot all the anarchists I had
to."[10] The "Republican"
government aimed the Belchite campaign, one of the bloodiest in the civil war,"
as much at demolishing the Council of Aragon, that anarchist
state-within-the-state, as at achieving any significant results against the
Nationalists," observes David Mitchell in his oral-history accounts of the civil
war.[11]

Thereafter, the "Spanish war," as it was nonchalantly called by a
bored world in the late 1930s, became nothing but a war—and a nightmare for the
Spanish people. Army and people alike were now completely demoralized and
"utterly pessimistic," observes Josep Costa, a CNT union leader who fought on
the Aragon front. "The men were like lambs going to a slaughter. There was no
longer an army, no longer anything. All the dynamic had been destroyed by the
treachery of the Communist party in the May events. We went through the motions
of fighting because there was an enemy in front of us. The trouble was that we
had an enemy behind us too. I saw a comrade lying dead with a wound in the back
of the neck that couldn't have been inflicted by the Nationalists. We were
constantly urged to join the Communist party. If you didn't you were in trouble.
Some men deserted to escape the bullying." That Communist execution squads were
wandering over battlefields after the troops had pushed forward and were killing
wounded anarchosyndicalists with their characteristic black-and-red insignia has
also been told to me by CNT men who participated in the Battle of the Ebro, the
last of the major "Republican" offensives in the civil war.

The end of the war on April 1, 1939, did not end the killings.
Franco systematically slaughtered some 200,000 of his opponents between the time
of his victory and the early 1940s in a carnage of genocidal proportions that
was meant to physically uproot the living source of the revolution. No serious
ideological efforts at conversion were made in the aftermath of the Francoist
victory. Rather, it was a vindictive counterrevolution that had its only
parallel, given the population and size of Spain, in Stalin's one-sided civil
war against the Soviet people.

A revolutionary civil war of the kind that occurred in Spain is
no longer possible, in my view, today—at least, not in the so-called "First
World." Capitalism itself, as well as the classes that are said to oppose it,
has changed significantly over the past fifty years. The Spanish workers were
formed by a cultural clash in which a richly communal world, largely
precapitalist, was brought into opposition to an industrial economy that had not
yet pervaded the character structure of the Spanish people. Far from yielding a
"backward" or "primitive" radical movement, these tensions between past and
present created an enormously vital one in which the traditions of an older,
more organic society heightened the critical perceptions and creative élan of a
large worker-peasant population. The embourgeoisement of the present-day
proletariat, not to speak of its loss of nerve in the face of a robotic and
cybernetic technology, are merely evidence of the vastly changed social
conditions and the overall commodification of society that has occurred since
1936.

Military technology, too, has changed. The weapons with which the
Franco forces and the "Republicans" fought each other seem like toys today, when
neutron bombs can be at the service of a completely ruthless ruling class. Force
alone can no longer oppose force with any hope of revolutionary success. On this
score, the greatest power lies with the rulers of society, not with the ruled.
Only the hollowing out of the coercive institutions in the prevailing society,
such as occurred in Portugal fairly recently and certainly in the Great French
Revolution of two centuries ago—where the old society, divested of all support,
collapsed at the first thrust—can yield radical social change. The barricade is
a symbol, not a physical bulwark. To raise it denotes resolute intent at best—it
is not a means to achieve change by insurrection. Perhaps the most lasting
physical resistance the Spanish workers and peasants could have organized, even
with Franco's military successes, would have been guerrilla warfare, a form of
struggle whose very name and greatest traditions during modern times are
Spanish. Yet none of the parties and organizations in the "Republican" zone
seriously contemplated guerrilla warfare. Instead, conventional armies opposed
conventional armies largely in trenches and as columns, until Franco's plodding
strategy and overwhelming superiority of supplies swept his opponents from the
field.

Could revolutionary warfare have defeated Franco? By this I mean
a truly political war which sought to capture the hearts of the Spanish people,
even that of the international working class, which exhibited a measure of class
consciousness and solidarity that seems monumental by present-day standards.
This presupposes the existence of working-class organizations that minimally
would not have been a burden on the awakened people of Spain—and hopefully,
would have contributed to the popular impetus. Given these conditions, my answer
would be yes, as proved to be the case in Barcelona at the beginning, where
Franco's army was defeated earlier than elsewhere. Franco's forces, which failed
to gain victories in central Spain's major cities, could have been kept from
taking such key radical centers as Seville, Córdoba, Oviedo, and Saragossa—the
latter two of strategic importance, linking the most industrialized urban
regions of Spain, the Basque country, and Catalonia. But the regime temporized
with the aid of the "Popular Front" parties—particularly the Communists and
right-wing Socialists—while confused workers in these key cities fell victim in
almost every case to military ruses, not combat. With far greater determination
than its enemies, the military drove a wedge between the Basques and Catalans
that the "Popular Army" never overcame.

Even so, Franco's forces stalled significantly at various times
in the war, such that Hitler expected his "crusade" to fail.[12]
The death blow to popular resistance was delivered by the Communist Party, which
was willing to risk the collapse of the entire war effort in its program to
dissolve the largely libertarian revolution—one which had tried, faintheartedly
enough, to come to a modus vivendi with its opponents on the "left." But no such
understanding was possible: the PCE sought to make the "Spanish war" respectable
primarily in the Soviet Union's interests and to cloak itself for all the
democratic world to see in the trappings of bourgeois virtue. The revolution had
tarnished this image and challenged the explicitly counterrevolutionary function
which the entire Communist International had adopted in the service of Soviet
diplomacy. Hence not only did the Spanish Revolution have to be exterminated,
its exterminators had to be seen as such. The "Reds" had to be regarded as a
safe bet by London, Paris, and Washington—and they gradually were as the
conflict in Spain came to an end.

By the time the war was internationalized by unstinting German
and Italian aid to Franco and the Soviet Union's highly conditional and limited
assistance to the "Republicans"—in exchange, I may add, for Spain's sizable gold
reserves—revolutionary victory was impossible. The May Days could have produced
a "Catalan Commune," a sparkling legacy on which the Spanish people could have
nourished their hopes for future struggles. It might even have become an
inspiration for radical movements throughout the world. But the CNT, already
partly bureaucratized in 1936, became appallingly so by 1937, with the
acquisition of buildings, funds, presses, and other material goodies. This
reinforced and rigidified the top-down hierarchical structure that is endemic to
syndicalist organization. With the May Days, the union's ministerial elite
completely arrested the revolution and acted as an outright obstacle to its
advance in later moments of crisis.

The Communist Party of Spain won all its demands for an army,
decollectivization, the extermination of its most dangerous opponents, the
Stalinization of the internal security forces, and the conversion of the social
revolution into a "war against fascism"—and it lost the war completely. Soviet
aid, selective and unreliable at best, came to an end in November 1938, nearly a
half-year before Franco's victory, while Italian and German aid continued up to
the end. When Stalin moved toward a pact with Hitler, he found the "Spanish war"
an embarrassment and simply denied it further support. The "Western democracies"
did nothing for "Republican" Spain despite that regime's success in suppressing
internal revolution and its Western-oriented policy in international affairs.
Thus, it denied Spanish Morocco, a major reservoir of Franco's troops, the
independence that might have turned it against the rebel army, despite promises
by Moroccan nationalists of support.

What was lost in Spain was the most magnificent proletariat that
radical movements had ever seen either before or after 1936-39—a classical
working class in the finest socialist and anarchist sense of the term. It was a
proletariat that was destroyed not by a growing material interest in bourgeois
society but by physical extermination. This occurred largely amidst a conspiracy
of silence by the international press in which the liberal establishment played
no less a role than the Communist. It is appalling that Herbert M. Matthews, the
New York Times's principal correspondent on the so-called "Loyalist" side of
the war, could write as recently as 1973,"I would say that there was a
revolution of sorts, but it should not be exaggerated. In one basic sense, there
was no revolution at all, since the republican government functioned much as it
did before the war."[13] Whether
this is stupidity or collusion with the forces that ended the "revolution of
sorts," I shall leave for the reader to judge. But it was correspondents of this
political temper who fed news of the "Spanish war" to the American people in the
1930s.

The literature that deals with the conflict, generally more
forthright than what was available for years after the war, has grown
enormously, supported by oral historians of considerable ability. Has the
American left learned from these accounts or from the Spanish collectives,
industrial as well as agricultural, which offer dramatic alternative models of
revolutionary modernization to the conventional ones based on nationalized
economies and centralized, often totalitarian, control? My answer would have to
be a depressing no. The decline of the "New Left" and the emergence of a more
"orthodox" one threatens to create a new myth of the "Popular Front" as a golden
era of radicalism. One would suppose that the new material on Spain, largely
left-wing in orientation, has been read by no one. The "Spanish war" is no
longer cloaked in silence, but the facts are being layered over with a sweet
sentimentality for the aging survivors of the "Lincoln Battalion" and the
Mom-Pop stereotypes in films like Seeing Red.

The truth, indeed, is out—but the ears to hear it and the minds
to learn from it seem to have been atrophied by a cultivated ignorance and a
nearly total loss of critical insight. "Partyness" has replaced politics,
mindless "loyalty" has replaced theory, "balance" in weighing the facts has
replaced commitment, and an ecumenical "radicalism" that embraces Stalinists and
reformists under the shredded banner of "unity" and "coalition" has replaced the
integrity of ideas and practice. That the banner of "unity" and "coalition"
became Spain's shroud and was used with impunity to destroy its revolution and
risk delivering the country to Franco is as remote from the collective wisdom of
the left today as it was fifty years ago in the cauldron of a bloody civil war.

Ultimately, the integrity of the Spanish left could be preserved
only if it articulated the most deep-seated traditions of the Spanish people:
their strong sense of community, their traditions of confederalism and local
autonomy, and their profound mistrust of the state. Whether the American left
shares with the Spanish left the popular legacy that the latter cleansed and
rescued from the right is a crucial problem that cannot be discussed here. But
insofar as the anarchists gave these traditions coherence and a radical thrust,
converting them into a political culture, not merely a contrived
"program," they survived generations of incredible persecution and repression.
Indeed, only when the Socialists resolved the problem of the relationship
between a political movement and a popular one by establishing their famous
"houses of the people" or casas del pueblo in Spain's villages,
neighborhoods, and cities did they become a vital movement in Spanish life and
politics.

The "Popular Front" ruptured this relationship by replacing a
popular culture with the "politics" of backroom "coalitions." The utterly
disparate parties that entered into "coalitions" were united solely by their
shared fear of the popular movement and of Franco. The left's need to deal with
its own relationship to popular traditions which have a latent radical
content—to cleanse these traditions and bring out their emancipatory
aspirations—remains a legacy of the Spanish Civil War that has not been
earnestly confronted, either by anarchists or by socialists. Until the need to
form a political culture is clearly defined and given the centrality it
deserves, the Spanish Revolution will remain not only one of the most
inexplicable chapters of radical history but the conscience of the radical
movement as a whole.

Notes:

[1]The Spanish Civil War (Part Five, "Inside the
Revolution"), a six-part documentary produced by BBC-Granada, Ltd. This series
is by far the best visual presentation of the Spanish Civil War I have seen and
contains an enormous amount of original oral history. It is a primary source for
material on the subject.

[2] Ronald Fraser, "The Popular Experience of War and Revolution"
in Revolution and War in Spain, 1931-1939, Paul Preston, ed. (London and
New York, 1983), pp. 226-27. This book is another valuable source.

[3] See Edward E. Malefakis, Agrarian Reform and Peasant
Revolution in Spain: Origins of the Civil War (London and New Haven, 1970),
pp. 284-92.

[4] For an evaluation of the alternative approaches that Europe
faced in the sixteenth century, including the Comunero revolt, see my
Urbanization Without Cities. Manuel Castells's The City and the
Grassroots (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983) contains a fascinating account
of the revolt and its implications, in what I am inclined to believe is a
departure from Castells's more traditional Marxist approach. For an English
account of the Comunero revolt and a useful criticism of historical
writing on the subject, see Stephan Haliczer's The Comuneros of Castile
(Madison, 1981). For a general background on the relationship between Spanish
anarchism and the popular culture of Spain, see my book The Spanish
Anarchists (New York, 1976; AK Press, 1994).

[6] Quoted in Pierre Broué and Emile Témime, The Revolution and
the Civil War in Spain (Cambridge, 1972), pg. 100.

[7] Quoted in David Mitchell, The Spanish Civil War (London
and New York, 1982) p. 31. This book is based on the BBC-Granada television
series, but just as the series does not contain a good deal of material in the
book, so the book does not contain a good deal of material in the series. The
interested reader is therefore well advised to consult both.

[11] Ibid, p. 158-59. Although the motives behind the Belchite
campaign verge on the incredible, they were not uncommon. Other cases of major
conflicts—and crises—in the Spanish Civil War were motivated by similar
political considerations, with no concern for the lives lost and the damage
inflicted on the "coalition" against Franco.